Mrs. Pax opens her writing desk; it is one I gave her; takes some delicate buff note-paper; I gave her that, too; dips her gold pen (my gift) into the inkstand, and writes--writes till eleven o'clock. Eleven! and I, her husband, Tom Pax, sit there and wait for her.
The next morning when I awake, I say, "Mary dear?" She says, "Hush! don't speak, I've just got a capital subject to write about for 'The Weekly Monopolizer.'" Not that I am _complaining_ of Mrs. Pax, not at all; not that I don't like my wife to be an authoress: I do. To be sure I can't say that I knew _exactly_ what it involved. I did not know, for instance, that the Press in speaking of her by her _nom-de-plume_ would call her "OUR Julia," but I would not have you think I object to her being literary. On the contrary, I am not sure that I do not rather like it; but I ask the Editor of "The Weekly Monopolizer," as a man--as a Christian--as a husband--if he thinks it right--if it is doing as he would be done by--to monopolize my wife's thoughts as early as five o'clock in the morning? I merely ask for information. I trust I have no resentful feelings toward the animal.
Not long since, John Bull, in the columns of an English newspaper, growled out his intense disgust at the "trash in the shape of American lady books," which constantly afflicted him from the other side of the Atlantic.
Here is a book called "Letters from the United States, Canada, and Cuba," by the Hon. Amelia M. Murray, a lady of supposable refinement, education, and of the highest social position in England; a lady whose daily bread was _not_ dependent upon the immediate publication of her book; who had leisure and opportunity carefully to write, and to correct and revise what she had written.
We propose giving a few extracts to show what advance has been made upon American literature, by our aristocratic British sister. But before beginning, we wish to throw our glove in John Bull's face, and defy him to produce a greater, or even an _equal_ amount of stupid twaddle, unrhetorical sentences, hap-hazard conclusions, petty, egotistical, uninteresting details, narrow-minded views, and utter want of talent, from between the covers of any _American_ lady book yet published.